Amrita by Banana Yoshimoto

Do you just exist because you're alive, or are you alive because you exist? When I look out and see you there, all of a sudden I feel like crying. My tears don't stem from sadness, instead they come from joy. Isn't that strange?

Good things come in threes: so I am going to adopt and give a spoiler free review on the book: Amrita by Banana Yoshimoto that I finished on 2.19.2025. I have a goal to devour as many books originally writen in Japanese and translated to English this year. This is my second book that falls in this category so far. I picked it out of impulse: I had just finished Yamada Taichi's Strangers and I was craving more ghosts and shadows. That was the reason really.

Reading Amrita is like slowing down time, drifting. Drifting on a boat in a vast sea at night. Comforting and warm, dark and suprising at times yet nourishing and full of youthfulness and life. This book will warm your senses to be more attuned to the rhythms of daily life that make it so boring and repetitive but you will come out appreciating that boredome. What happens when you cannot grasp your own life completely, when you have a veil or a trauma covering your field of vision and you cannot shake it off, Sakumi will take you through what that feels like. She feels that - "Still, the glass wall that came between me and myself, something that should have been clear and lucid, was cloudy and unclear"

To exist in this world is to dance to the tune of the world, wherever you are, whenever you are. You are thrown into the world and you have no choice but to gather yourself and go about the business of living. On living and accepting others she notices that one should be aware that - "People are full of pain. When an imperfect person attampts to accept the imperfections of other people, the result is always painful, because individual storms that find their way into our hearts survive in different places Sometimes we tend to focus on images that appear to be strangely alive"

The journey of Amrita and its lasting impact on me was taken in different cities, with many cups of coffee and of course many words underlined and stolen from the book to hold on to. My favourite of all however was actually closer to the end: "Do you just exist because you're alive, or are you alive because you exist? When I look out and see you there, all of a sudden I feel like crying. My tears don't stem from sadness, instead they come from joy. Isn't that strange?" I felt strange reading this as a person who claims to prefer the solitude and reclusive lifetstyle. With those words I felt the human connection that we sometimes forget exists in around us, which makes us one and a multitude. I appreciated human connection.